TURKOMANS BETWEEN TWO EMPIRES: THE ... - Bilkent University

actual kinship ties 109 . As Barfield delineates it, “The closer we get to the bottom ranks of
any tribal system, the more the system relies on actual descent and affinal ties; the
higher we go in the same structure, the more political its relationships become.” 110
As genealogy serves as the pillar of the theory of tribal polity, the chief occupies
the focus of this theory. The person of the chief stays at the top of the pyramid. He has
three main functions: 1) organizing intra-tribal economy such as allotting pastures,
determining migration routes, coordinating migrations of the tribe, 2) settling disputes
within the tribe, 3) representing the tribe and safeguarding its benefits in relations with
other tribes or states. 111 These functions also constitute the factors that lead to the
emergence of leadership in a nomadic society. Namely, the need to allocate key sources,
the establishing and regularizing of routes of pastoral migration, the need of certain
order, the need for defense, the struggle for the livestock, pastures, and arable lands,
migrations and wars, the desire of certain groups of nomads to subdue others,
particularities of relations and interactions with the outside sedentary world requisite the
accumulation of power in one hand. 112 The sources that the chief derives his power from
are closely related to the cohesive forces that holds tribesmen together. As is already
mentioned, one of those cohesive forces is genealogy.
Lindner calls attention to another significant means of social solidarity in tribal
organizations: common interest. As many other anthropologists, he regards genealogy as
an “idiom or charters that nomads use to explain their history and politics” 113 , but never
109 For a case study among Qashka’i Tribe in southwestern Iran see. Beck, “Tribes and the State in
Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Iran”, p. 193.
110 Barfield, p. 157.
111 See for the case of Basseri, for example, Barth, pp. 75-76.
112 Khazanov, Nomads and the Outside World, p. 148-9.
113 Rudi Paul Lindner, “What was a Nomadic Tribe?”, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol.
24, no. 4, 1982, p. 696.
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